


Quantum Entanglement

by necrobotanical



Category: Slime Rancher (Video Game)
Genre: Beatrix Doesn't Like Being Indoors, Gen, I wrote this in one lunchtime and intended it to be a one shot, Minor Species Change, Passing Out, it is NOT a one shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-02-25 14:28:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22417774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/necrobotanical/pseuds/necrobotanical
Summary: A friend, and ocean, and a ruined garden. Working with certain slimes has side effects, and scientists aren't renowned for their interpersonal skills.
Relationships: Viktor Humphries & Beatrix LeBeau
Comments: 10
Kudos: 55





	1. The Ruined Garden

Living under the sea had its perks. Midsummer on the far, far range was blisteringly hot, even in the quiet green depths of the Moss Blanket, so her ranch was a shimmering maze of heat, drones, and dozy, half-melted slimes - naturally, when Viktor offered to let her stay in his lab for a few months "to keep the slimes healthy", she jumped at the chance. His lab was a sprawling mess of corridors and so he had plenty of room for her slimes to live. In all honesty, Beatrix would have liked to be back on the surface. The depths of the slime sea made her uneasy. The offer, however, was exceedingly generous - and, well, her slimes were starting to get heat stroke, and there's only so much a solar shield can do - so she stuck it out. Of course, she only realised the second reason much later.

For someone like Beatrix, slime ranching was the ideal profession. Outdoors, physically demanding, but keeping her well away from people. She'd never really liked crowds, or cities, or trains, or anything like that - preferring the company of plants and fish to other people. It was the main reason, she supposed, why she was putting off replying to Casey's starmails. Because of this, she'd thought that living with Viktor would be deeply stressful. So, for the first month, she'd only stayed indoors long enough to feed and check over her slimes, before heading out to the Moss Blanket or Indigo Quarry, and spending as long as she could there. Usually, Viktor would only see her in the mornings, and then only to exchange some small talk - a task he seemed to find as insurmountable as she did - and to ask her for this or that slime or plant. Then she found the garden. 

Well, maybe garden was overstating it a bit. It was a large, empty storeroom with empty growbeds and broken lamps, filled with dirt and debris. When she asked about it, he seemed surprised. "Oh. I didn't- I didn't actually know that was there! I don't have much of a green thumb, myself, but a space to study how slimes would actually interact with plants... or maybe as a food source? It would certainly save Ogden some work..." he trailed off, lost in thought, before suddenly brightening. "Of course, if you were to want to try and fix it up, be my guest! Though it's- I don't- you definitely don't have to, it was just, just a... thought..?" She reassured him that it's fine, and that she'd been needing a new project ever since she managed to get her quantums settled. At the mention of quantum slimes his full attention snapped to her. "You managed to get quantums to settle down somewhere? I'm impressed! If it wouldn't be too much trouble, could I borrow one for some tests? It'll remain unharmed, I assure you, but it could be key to a very interesting new line of study! The slime sea is something of a gestalt entity, yes?" She gave him a confused look. "Oh! Basically, it's a composite of the genetic material of every slime on the planet - which is why they don't show any fear when falling in, despite their apparent death, but do when faced with a Tarr! They come out again with the same behavioral pattern and responses, especially to food sources and threats - it's a loose sort of hive mind." 

He continued explaining his theory on how different slime species were affected, branching into how their abilities impacted current theories within his field - physics, apparently - for nearly an hour. It was honestly quite cute. He flushed and stuttered when she asked if he'd mind continuing to explain while she fixed the lamps in the garden, saying that he needed to work and apologizing for keeping her for so long. She hummed to herself as she set to work on the frayed wiring of the room, repairing what she could and replacing what she couldn't. Above her, hazy through the slime, the sun had almost set. The viscous water shattered the already beautiful display into a dazzling polychromatic whirl that reminded her of a broken CD, stopping her dead in her tracks to watch. After a while, she realised that Viktor was standing beside her, just as awestruck as she was, a displeased quantum slime halfway through attempting to wriggle out of his arms, sparking angry blue and red. Later, once she'd calmed the slime down and started to work on cleaning out the floor, she attributed the echoes floating serenely in the corners of the room to the angry quantum slime. The fact that they were different in hue to the ones in the ruins was, to a tired and sore Beatrix, unremarkable.

The next few days saw her indoors more often than not, working on the garden. She wiped her face and stretched lazily backwards, wincing at the pops from her spine, and stared into the middle distance. Not thinking of anything in particular, just… existing. The organized chaos of a new garden surrounded her, filling the air with the rich fragrance of fresh-turned earth – and the ever-present disinfectant smell of Viktor’s labs. It had bothered her at first but now it was almost comforting. She wasn’t about to examine that one too closely. Speaking… or, well, thinking of him reminded her that he’d asked her to participate in a few experiments that afternoon. Nothing invasive, just measuring “temporal flux levels”, whatever that meant. Sighing, she put down her tools and wiped her hands on her trousers, heading out to his workrooms. She’d been there before, of course, to help with the glitch slimes and later to keep her quantums from deciding that they were jumping timelines to escape a big scary machine (a centrifuge that wasn’t even on) so she knew the way. Still, there was something labyrinthine about his base, she thought, then chuckled to herself. Labyrinthine laboratory. His vocabulary was rubbing off on her.

Over time, the echoes became something of a concern for her. In the sunset garden, nearly a month ago, they were few and weak enough to comfortably be attributed to the distressed quantum slime, but now… now it was just getting silly. The things were everywhere. Her garden – now functional, planted with fruit and vegetables from both her ranch and Ogden’s, her latest project focused on finding a way to grow kookadobas – looked like she’d hung several strings of fairy lights from the ceiling. They’d started popping up in other parts of Viktor’s lab, too, causing him a measure of concern. Oh, sure, he hadn’t said anything, but he didn’t need to. She wasn’t blind. More to the point, after the first round of tests, he had A. not let her see the results, pleading inaccuracies, and B. immediately started doing more tests. Lots more tests, to the point that she was almost surprised he’d let her do anything else. Even worse, he looked progressively more worried than excited. Still, he needed mosaic slimes, and didn’t have any way of getting them himself, so… here she was. In the ancient ruins, following a route she had down to an art. 

Then the double vision started.

It wasn’t normal double vision, was the first thing she noticed. It was almost like looking through a periscope with only one eye – she could see the front and the back of the phase lemon tree at the same time. When she turned her head, her perspectives swam dizzyingly around her, the platform she was on swaying beneath her feet. Her vision darkened, tunneled, spun, and she fell headlong towards the slime sea.

When she woke up, she… wasn’t indoors. Not on her ranch, not in Viktor’s lab. She was in the ancient ruins, three platforms over from where she’d fallen. Into the sea. How in the… how was she still out here? How was she conscious again, after what her watch stubbornly insisted had only been an hour? And what was with the literal double vision? Head spinning with questions, she pushed herself upright, before catching sight of her arm. Where once her skin had been smooth brown, uninterrupted save for a few thin scars from the first encounters with the Tarr, it was now crisscrossed with strange, intricate designs. Designs which closely mirrored the decorations of the ruins around her, which in several places flawlessly imitated the markings of the quantum slimes native to these ancient walls – slimes she’d spent the last three and a half years of her life living and working with so closely, she slept in their corral more often than her own bed.


	2. Chapter 2

Beatrice was nothing if not practical. She was of the mindset that if there wasn't anything immediate she could do about a problem, it could wait until there was. 

Unfortunately, this was extreme, even for her.

She pressed on through the ruins, ignoring the blurriness that crept back into her vision every now and then, and finally reached the teleporter to the Glass Desert, only to see... Viktor. A very worried Viktor, staring at the teleporter with a deeply furrowed brow.  
"Uh... Viktor? Why are you out here?" He jolted, whipping around to face her with enough speed to make her reflexively step back. Before she could react, he'd rushed forwards, grabbing her shoulders.  
"Bea! There you are! Do you- I was- You're- Do you have any idea how worried I was?!" Huh? Okay, of everything he could have said, that... was not what she was expecting. By the time she managed to recollect her thoughts, he'd let her go, stepping back. She couldn't quite tell, between the combination of his dark skin and goggles, but it almost looked like he was blushing. No, stop it, bad Bea. Not the time. She was wrenched out of that particular spiral by his hand on her wrist, pulling her arm up to eye level. He didn't say anything for a few minutes. Then, with an almost reverently soft voice...

"What the fuck?"  
She burst out laughing. 

Once she'd started, she couldn't stop. After a few seconds of dumbfounded staring, his mouth twitched, and he started giggling too, quickly progressing into silent wheezing as they both tried to get literally any air to stay in their lungs. Beatrice was the first to get her lungs under control, shakily wiping her eyes and pulling herself to her feet. She offered a hand to Viktor, who was slumped over, still laughing, and pulled him to his feet awkwardly. He coughed, adjusted his coat, coughed again. She hiked her vac-pack back onto her shoulders. "So... should we get home?" 

"Sounds good to me."

The sun had already set by the time they got back to Viktor's lab, and Bea's vision was splitting again. She'd only got a few steps inside the door when she saw herself. Or, a version of herself, hazy and staticky, standing by the console. A version of herself, solid and fleshy, standing just inside the lab. Both as real as each other. The instant stretched on and on, the new markings spiralling up her arms sparking red and blue and then she was standing by the console. Viktor's eyes were wide, his goggles hanging limply around his neck. In the corners of the room, a few echoes glimmered. The air was sharp with the ozone smell of the ancient ruins. They maintained eye contact for a few minutes, while a tentative grin spread across Viktor's face.   
"Well, that isn't what I thought was going on, but... it's definitely, uh, something." He cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. "Did you... uh... notice anything different in the lead-up to this? Any, I don't know, headaches or blurry vision?" Bea still couldn't really get her head around what had just happened, so she just followed Viktor further into the lab, trying to keep up with his barrage of questions as he threw on the lights in the living room.

"Viktor, did you... know? That something like this would happen."  
"Honestly? No. I knew something was wrong, but I thought it was a problem with my instruments, not... whatever's going on here." Well, that'd explain the worried looks.  
"Okay, so, uh, any ideas as to what happened? Because I've got nothing." He sighed, and rubbed his chin, cocking his head to one side.  
"I have... a theory. Nothing concrete," he waved his hand, leaning forwards slightly, "not yet. You work closely with quantum slimes, yes? And you spend a lot of time in the ancient ruins. It's possible, then, that the abilities of the slimes... rubbed off on you, so to speak. Destabilized your connection to the 'main' timeline enough for you to mimic their pseudo-teleportation." His eyes glittered in the soft light of the room, his usual nervousness completely lost as he got into the science behind her new abilities.

Summers on the Far, Far Range were blisteringly hot, but also fairly short. The next two weeks, for Bea, were spent moving her slimes back to her own ranch as autumn set in in earnest, and learning to control her timeline jumping. Everything settled back into some kind of routine - tending to her ranch in the morning, running tests with Viktor in the afternoons. However, they'd run out of tests to conduct. Viktor had made it fairly clear that he'd definitely have more research to conduct on her - with her consent, of course, as he'd stammered frantically after realising he hadn't actually asked her - but that he needed time to analyse the data he'd collected. And Beatrice missed him. It was a small, subtle thing, fluttering against her ribs like a phosphor slime, but it was definitely there. 

She guessed, opening her starmail for the first time in months, she had some research of her own to conduct.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not the last thing i'll b writing for my lovely slime children... Expect More.  
> When? Who knows.

**Author's Note:**

> sdfkflgsjkh why am I starting a new multichapter fic when I have another on the go


End file.
